工程高管离职潮：十大原因与创始人模式应对

In my ~20 years in this industry, I’ve not seen as many capable engineering leaders opting out or taking prolonged breaks as now, with some high-ranking engineering leaders – CTOs, VPs of Engineering, heads of engineering, etc. – quitting their high-status roles and departing, if not into the sunset, then at least with nothing lined up.

To find out what might be behind this spate of sign-outs, I talked with almost 20 engineering leaders currently on a career break – or seriously considering one – and they let me into their personal reasons for deciding to jam the brakes on their careers. Thanks to everyone who shared their input!

Today, we cover:

• Ten of the most common reasons for quitting, sometimes without the next gig lined up:
• 1. The job got (much) worse
• 2. The startup is “losing” and becoming worthless
• 3. Not being AI-native enough for other skills to be relevant
• 4. Their predecessor saw the “writing on the wall”
• 5. Long hours – rarely decisive
• 6. Smaller teams mean less need for leaders
• 7. Fractional CTO work preferred over fulltime positions
• 8. AI startups pay ICs more than non-AI startups pay executives
• 9. Quitting to launch their own business
• 10. Burnout
• “Founder mode” looks here to stay, so how to deal with it? And has it made the CTO and VPE roles become “low ROI”?
• ‘Work at companies that truly want to drive change’. A personal account from someone who took the VP of Engineering role at Gitpod (later, Ona, now acquired by OpenAI) and enjoyed a rewarding experience. Matt Boyle says he interviewed the employer beforehand on whether their business truly leans into the changes brought by AI.

“Just me?”

I was recently messaged by a head of engineering in San Francisco, who said:

“I’m talking to four startups in San Francisco about the head of engineering roles. Pretty normal.

But one interesting pattern is how founding CTOs/heads of engineering are stepping away to take a full career break. We’re talking about two of these four startups. And these are good startups!

Have you seen this trend? I have a small number of data points here, so you might have a broader view.”

I asked around privately, and it turns out a majority of the CTO-level folks I spoke to are considering the very same thing, or are actually in the process of leaving the office for a long spell away; 6/10 engineering leaders said they’re on the way out.

1. The job got (much) worse

Unrealistic expectations, including about AI, by founders and CEOs are the leading cause of jobs turning bad for CTOs and VPEs right now in 2026:

• CTO expected to magically transform the company to be “AI-native”
• CTO must make significant engineering cost cuts of up to 20-50%, including morale-sapping job cuts
• “Do more with less” equals shipping more with fewer people (e.g., no backfills)
• CTO faces pressure on business results as AI coding bills rack up
• Founder slop: they want wonky AI prototypes shipped as full-blown products within weeks

Hands-on founders with “AI psychosis” make the job predictably harder, according to one CTO who just signed out of his job:

“Managing ‘AI psychosis’ with founders and executive peers has become very difficult. For example, what do you do when a founder ships a 60,000-line pull request into the product, gleaming with joy at how much more productive they’ve become with AI? They won’t see all the issues with that PR, and how do you bring up that they’ve created a massive amount of tech debt? Especially without looking like a ‘Debbie Downer’.”

Founder slop issues begin when top leaders get excited about AI’s capability, then get hands-on and start issuing PRs, and shipping code to production. It can cause issues across the board:

• Accountability. Who’s oncall when founder-shipped code breaks? In the “you build it, you own it” culture of startups, it’s confusing when a founder gets hands-on while not owning their work.
• Quality out the door: if a founder’s half-baked features are accepted, it sends the wider message that quality does not matter. Some people may adopt this attitude to their own work.
• A founder can overrule whatever was previously agreed with the CTO or VPE about what to build next. Vibes the founder has or feels are reason enough.

Another way that leadership roles have diminished is that craft and quality are less important, says a VP of engineering who’s in the process of signing out of their job:

“Shipping software became all about speed. Finding differentiation with your product in the market is brutal, and speed / go-to-market becomes the biggest differentiator. Craft, quality, and care going into the product are taking a backseat.”

Things also go bad when companies don’t ‘get’ AI+engineering, except as a way to cut jobs. CTOs I talked to mentioned the likes of Ramp, Stripe, and Notion as places that understand how to integrate AI into the engineering culture with a growth mindset without forsaking quality. Elsewhere, bad vibes dominate at places where going all-in on AI leads to the cynical conclusion that product management, design, and engineering leadership are irrelevant.

2. The startup is “losing” and becoming worthless

Director+ roles have a few differences from individual-contributor engineering ones:

• Larger equity stake in the business. Base salary at these levels is often similar to a staff engineer’s, but usually with more generous equity grants – especially at the VP of Engineering and CTO levels. A good financial outcome depends on the company becoming more valuable, and – in the case of private companies – having a good exit by being acquired or selling shares.
• Understanding of the business and competition is a baseline. At Director+ level, a big part of the job is making strategic decisions that grow the business and help the company get ahead. It’s a nice-to-have for an engineer to possess business acumen, but director-and-above folks use it much more than most individual contributors (ICs). Great engineering leaders are good at understanding business performance and outlook.

A company that adopts AI rapidly usually falls into one of three buckets:

• “AI-native”, building & selling AI products. The large AI labs and a select few “AI-native” startups are thriving, but many AI startups with VC funding struggle. Engineering leaders know this, and that their equity – usually issued as options – could end up worthless.
• Software startups threatened by AI-native businesses. Good businesses in the pre-AI world can be threatened by AI today, like SaaS startups selling seat-based products in areas where agents are taking over the functionality. They have to pivot their businesses or seek an exit. Bending Spoons buying Airtable for less than the company raised is an example of a business threatened by AI and choosing to sell, instead of pivoting the whole business.
• Unaffected by AI. Usually stable businesses which do more than software, such as with a real-world side to the operation like manufacturing or distribution.

The majority of software startups fall into one of the first two buckets of being AI-native or under threat. Senior leaders at such companies are in a good position to evaluate whether their company is a “winner” worth staying with.

Leaving due to equity becoming worthless

A CTO who quit their startup told me:

“My company would have needed a massive exit for me to realize any upside. I had an equity grant that was 2% of the common shares. However, this equity was behind an already steep preference stack for investors, post Series A.”

This CTO had a very generous equity grant at 2% of shares, so what made him leave it behind? They laid out how it will be difficult to get any benefit from them because the shares are most likely rendered worthless by rules about the order in which different investors get their share of the pie: